On the Fringes of Colours

I am turning Thomas Young’s sparkling language into poetry!

Raw material: The Bakerian Lecture, Experiments and Calculations relative to Physical Optics, 1803. It’s really Colours, not Colors in this case!

I am picking a single line from the first page of this historical article, two lines from each other page. No editing and rearranging allowed! Let your subconsciousness speak by selecting snippets of text!

Having completed the poem, I am adding images of my own making.

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on the fringes of colours

to reflect the sun’s light
plunge it more deeply into the shadow

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for want of a sufficient intensity
to receive the angle of the shadow on its extremity

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the light always remains white
being supposed to correspond to a double interval

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of the hair
of the object
of the wire
of disappearance

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Hence we are warranted in inferring
If we imagined the shadow of the wire

each kind of light disappears and reappears
to point immediately to a similarity in the causes

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it approaches to its axis
reflected from the posterior surface

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according to the difference of time occupied in the passage
such supernumerary colours are not often seen

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two arches of reddish purple, and two of green
two things which well deserve to be taken notice of

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encompassing the observer’s shadow in a mist
to refrain at least from idle declamation

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extinguishing the light
in this chain of reasoning

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as the wind passes through a grove of trees
impress us with an idea of a complication
when viewed through a prism
there are strong reasons for believing

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extend beyond the violet

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I threw this image on paper
not sufficiently great
sufficient to complete
the analogy

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Adding a list of references here – related articles of mine, about my creative process for Found Poetry, where I have presented these pictures for the first time, scientific background:

I think it should be presented like poetry as well:

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Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape
Discretized and Inverted

Complex Alien Eclipse
The Origin of Darkness

Newton’s Space Probes Investigate my Ribbons of Diffraction
Prismatic. Dispersed. Triangular.
True Colors

Solid and Ethereal. Reality and Imagination.
Lord of the SID

Diffraction Patterns for Everyone!
Stellar Corona
Plural Form

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One of the blog posts is an Easter egg and not about Art, or only if you interpret ‘art’ very broadly.

Staying true to the original (2012) mission of this website and blog I will combine anything! Since then, this site has gone through more than one metamorphosis. It has been my place for personal musings about life in the corporate world and as a small business owner. I turned it into a science blog, trying to convey the fascination of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. Suddenly the calculations and diagrams related to our heat pump project took over the site, and I called it ‘Research Notes’. I’ve called myself a physicist turned security consultant turned renewable energy engineer, and then I added ‘or a combination of all of those’. And lest not at all forget the hacking write-ups, after I discovered pentesting. And the meta comments on blogging and re-writing the code for my other websites over and over.

I invested ridiculous efforts into categorizing and (re-)tagging the articles for consistent ‘brackets’ around all of this, creating hand-crafted lists of posts, dropping them again. The true bracket around everything has been me being interested in all of it. In the likely case you came here, following link relating to hacking or heat pumps: Yes, I know, it is confusing! The original categories are still here, tucked away at the bottom of the About page.

Disclaimer / ‘managing the expectations’ of long-term followers :-) The only stable genre here has been my Found Poetry though. During the pandemic, this form of art mutated just as the virus. Digital Art has emerged and not gone away since.

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